Rated G, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with Audrey Tautou (Amelie Poulain), Mathieu Kassovitz (Nino Quincammpoix), Rufus (Amelie's father), Yolande Moreau (Madeleine Wallace), running time: 122 minutes. In French, with Chinese subtitles.
Amelie Poulain is a waitress in a Montmarte cafe who lives a quiet life in a building occupied by some unusual characters; a weepy conciege, a painter with fragile bones who each year repaints a celebrated Renoir, and a dyspeptic grocer. When one day she finds a box of childhood memories stashed in her apartment decades earlier, she vows to return the contents to its estranged owner. This simple act of kindness alters the course of her life as she dedicates herself to becoming a doer of increasingly complex good deeds for the woebegone -- along the way, of course, discovering love. Jeunet, who's never made an upbeat film in his life, set out to do just that here. Given the film's popularity in France, he seems to have been successful. Fifty million French people can't be wrong. Or so the saying goes.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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